Эльвира Барякина - Russian Treasures

Nina snatched the envelope out of the old countess’s hand. “What’s the return address?”

But it was impossible to read. Someone had placed a sticky cup of tea on the corner of the envelope and torn off the top layer of paper. Nina could make out nothing but the word “Petrograd” and the apartment number.

“Please don’t mention this to Mr. Fomin,” Nina whispered.

The old countess gave her a reproachful look. “Why do you think I summoned you here instead of bringing you the letter in the dining room?”

“Thank you!” Nina found herself breaking down in tears. “I’m so afraid that if Klim comes back, Mr. Fomin will—”

Suddenly, the old countess did something unthinkable: she patted Nina on the shoulder.

“To be honest with you, I didn’t expect Mr. Rogov to stay in Russia,” Sofia Karlovna said. “Since he hasn’t betrayed you, he deserves to be treated with the same respect as he has evidently shown us. As for Mr. Fomin, don’t worry too much about him. Right now, there is nothing you can do about your situation, but later, who knows how things will turn out? As you grow older, you start to notice that most of the alarms in our lives turn out to be false ones.”

1

Dr. Sablin was perfectly aware that his wife had taken a lover. The squat, red-faced soldier called Osip who now worked at the regional Military Commissariat and had appointed Lubochka head of its canteen. If in the past, she had channeled her energy into putting the lives of her friends in order, now she did the same for that vats of sour cream and other provisions that had been confiscated by the Cheka and handed over to the Commissariat. Lubochka could keep track of hundreds of names in her head and knew exactly who needed what, and that made her very useful.

Everybody in the hospital knew about Dr. Sablin’s misfortune.

“I simply don’t understand it!” Ilya Nikolaevich, the chief doctor at the hospital, had exclaimed when he next saw Sablin. “You need to put your foot down. I know that morals are in decline and that we live in troubled times—but you know as well as I do how it will end: one day this fine fellow will stick a knife in her ribs. Do you remember that young cabaret girl who was brought in to us recently? Well, it’ll be the same story with your Lubochka.”

“If Lubochka ends up on my operation table, I’ll shove the knife into her ribs myself,” Sablin had said in a husky voice.

Ilya Nikolaevich had gaped at him for a moment. “If I ever hear you talk like that again, you’ll be out of a job.”

Sablin didn’t care. He felt as if his life was pouring out of him, as though he were hemorrhaging to death and there was no way to staunch the flow.

When Sablin had suggested to Lubochka that they divorce, she had merely nodded but hadn’t brought the subject up again since.

The problem was that she had no place to go. Initially, Lubochka had hoped that she and Osip could move into her father’s house, but it had been requisitioned as a “shelter for proletarian widows.” Osip lived in his office in the building of the former seminary and didn’t want to ask his bosses for anything. He believed that a private apartment was too much of a luxury, and a true Bolshevik should share the same hardships the people suffered.

Sablin and Lubochka now slept in different bedrooms and barely exchanged a word beyond icy greetings as they passed each other in the house. Sablin left money on the chest of drawers in his wife’s room, and Lubochka made sure that there was food in the house for dinner.

Sablin had no idea and didn’t care to know where Lubochka spent her days. When he pictured his wife in the arms of another man, he—whom his wife thought “incapable of real emotion”—wanted nothing more than to plunge a scalpel into his heart.

2

Osip Drugov had been born in the village of Chukino in the Balakhna rural district. His mother’s hands had been so calloused from work that they would catch in his hair when she stroked his head. His father was a drinker and a fighter, but when he was sober, he tried to do his best for his family.

Once, he went to the market and brought Osip a brand new pair of leather boots. “You should only wear them in church,” he said to his son. “You’ll never get another pair. Our kind were born to wear bast shoes.”

However, Osip dreamed of wearing leather boots every day and also a large peaked cap and a brass chain for his waistcoat. He begged his parents to let him go to Sormovo, Nizhny Novgorod’s industrial district. Osip had imagined life in a factory would be some sort of proletarian workers’ paradise—full of strong, jovial young men who had left their villages to make their fortunes in the city. They learned all sorts of things, they went away to distant lands, and they even traveled to work on a tram—a sort of huge metal carriage that moved without horses.

But in reality, Osip found himself in hell, not paradise. The workshops of the Sormovo factory were illuminated by the crimson flames of the constantly burning furnaces and the streams of red-hot metal flowing down the gutters, and it was made even more unbearable by the roar of the machinery. Here, even the healthiest of men became crippled by work in the span of a few years.

Osip didn’t understand why things were as they were. Why was it that some had money to burn, and others had to sweat and slave in scorching factory workshops? The priest told him that it had ever been thus and that it was sinful to ask such questions.

Osip started to drink and often ended up at the police station. There he came into contact with Bolsheviks who gave him his purpose in life back and cured his sick soul. He felt like a wounded soldier who had been rescued from the field of battle. The Bolsheviks were clever; they understood the great science of Marxism that explained who was to blame for the misery of factory workers like Osip and what those workers needed to do to improve their lives.

The Bolshevik revolution was the biggest event in Osip’s life, and his greatest achievement was Lubochka. He found it hard to believe that a doctor’s wife could have fallen in love with him, an uneducated man.

He did his best to mask his confusion by making impassioned political speeches to her.

“We are forging a new way of life,” Osip told Lubochka. “We will build new communal houses. All of us will work in teams. Every one of us shall have the same sort of accommodation, furniture, and clothes. No one will have luxuries, so there will be no envy or greed. Won’t that be wonderful?”

She smiled enigmatically. “I’m afraid we probably won’t live long enough to see that become a reality.”

“We will!” Osip exclaimed but then fell silent, abashed.

Above all, he was afraid that Lubochka would become disappointed—in him, in the revolution, and in the Bolshevik Party. And there were plenty of reasons to be disappointed.

During the first months of the revolution, Osip had been fond of repeating Lenin’s statement that it would be simple for the state to be run by the people themselves. But nothing was going according to plan. Criminals and madmen had joined the Cheka while the workers who had been put in charge of factories had allowed them to idle into talking shops.

An epidemic of food riots engulfed the city. Osip traveled from factory to factory trying to drum up support and issuing empty threats. Nothing he did had any effect.

“Down with Lenin and horse meat!” the crowd started to shout as soon as he mounted the rostrum. “Give us the Tsar and our salted bacon back!”

Osip knew that a counter-revolution could only be controlled with force. On the instruction of his Commissariat, he combed military warehouses, gathered up broken weaponry, and organized repair shops. No one—not even Lubochka—knew how hard this work was for Osip.

3

The food situation in Russia was deteriorating every day. It seemed that the well-to-do peasants—the kulaks—were setting out to starve the revolutionary government. They hid their grain and refused to give it up to the hungry cities. As soon as the food brigades went into the countryside, the peasants would start rioting.

Osip studied the reports about the rebellions. The scenario was always the same: the men from the food brigades didn’t care who was rich and who was poor. They went from home to home taking any food they could find and stockpiling it at random. The grain and meat spoiled, and anything that actually made it to the city was embezzled by the local officials.

Some of the peasants had brought sawn-off rifles back from the front, and they greeted the food brigades with hails of bullets. To keep them under control, the Bolsheviks periodically bombarded villages with artillery fire.

During the next meeting of the Regional Executive Committee, Osip met the issue head-on. “We need to change the makeup of our food brigades. If we only accept working-class people and not bourgeois types masquerading as workers, then all this abuse of power will stop. The commanders should be trustworthy party members devoted to our communist ideals.”

He received an unexpected reply.

“You are just the sort of person we need, Comrade Drugov. You should head a food brigade and set an example for everyone.”

4

Osip pored over the map.

Where should we go? he thought. To my home village? But there are no more than a couple of kulak households there, and my men will eat the village’s supplies in a matter of days.

Osip’s finger hovered over the rural district of Bolsheyelnitskaya. A friend of his had once told him that the people there were quite prosperous.

Osip summoned a couple dozen volunteers for his food brigade, workers from the Etna factory.

When they reached their destination, Osip asked a terrified signalman where they might find the local kulaks.

“Go to Utechino,” he said. “They’re a bad lot there—greedy, the lot of them.”

It was dark when they arrived in Utechino. Osip told his men to scatter throughout the village and explain to the locals that they were Red Army soldiers who had become separated from their regiment. He, his assistant Fedunya, and another lad, red-haired Andreika, went up to the last house on the street. Osip struck a match and looked over the sturdy gates. It seemed that the signalman had been telling the truth: Utechino was indeed a prosperous village.

A guard dog on a chain barked behind the gates in a frenzy. Osip shifted from one foot to the other, reluctant to knock at the gate. The villagers were unpredictable and could well be violent. Many a food brigade volunteer had been killed or gone missing in the countryside.

The men drew lots. It fell to Osip to lead the way. He pulled his pistol out of his holster and thumped loudly on the gate with his fist.

“Who’s there?” called a suspicious male voice.

“Red Army soldiers,” Osip said. “Only three of us. Can we spend the night in your house? We have supplies—there’s no need to feed us.”

That was a lie too. They had eaten their ration—a pound of bread and a small kettle of soup—earlier that morning.

The master of the house unbolted the gates. Osip struck another match. Pah, he thought. Just an old man with an oven fork.

“Who might you be then: Bolsheviks or Communists?” the old man asked. Evidently, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box when it came to state ideology.

“Neither,” Osip said with relief. “We’re just common folks.”

The old man welcomed them inside his dark house. While they were settling themselves down for the night on the floor, he asked them about the city, the war, and the prices, but he didn’t offer them any food, although it was clear that they had had nothing to eat.

Parasite! Osip thought indignantly. We’ll deal with you in the morning.

“Your rifles don’t go off by themselves, do they?” asked a young woman lying on the big brick oven. “We had another lot here before you, and one of the soldier’s rifles went off in the middle of the night.”

Their hosts didn’t have the slightest interest in politics. Only their little boy—seven to ten years old judging by his voice—asked if it was true that the Tsar had been sent into exile.

When the family was sound asleep, Fedunya moved closer to Osip.

“I had to run outside earlier, and I heard the sound of a cow—more than one, I think. These people are rich, I tell you.”